Along the St Paul’s Bay promenade one comes across a Boċċi pitch. We stopped for a few minutes to watch these guys playing a game.
Bocci is a popular game played all over the Maltese islands. There is a Bocci club in almost every village in Malta and Gozo – these have their own federation. Variations of the game can be found all over the world.
Bocci is played on a sand-covered smooth surface, and each team has a minimum of two players. The jack ball is around the size of a marble – very often it is a ball from a broken ball-bearing. In each team of two: one player takes three snooker-size balls and his role is to roll his balls as close to the jack ball as possible. The other, who – in the absence of a name - I call ‘the striker’, has four cylinder-like balls made of tafnol about 5-6 inches long with a diameter of around 2and1/2 inches - his role is to strike off the opponents’ balls that are closer to the jack ball than his team’s. The team that gets its balls closer to the jack ball wins.
In these four shots that I took:
Upper left: the ‘striker’ of the red team aims at the green snooker ball of the opponents;
Upper right: the ball of the ‘striker’ of the red team is on its way (it missed);
Lower right: the red team has used all its balls; the ‘striker’ of the green team almost does what his opposing ‘striker’ failed to do – he missed the green ball by a hair’s breath (he was probably aiming at the red striker’s ball);
Lower left: the green team still won this game by at least 3 points (three green balls closest to the jack ball). The striker is trying to place what is left of his balls close to the jack ball to increase the score.
When my children were young we used to go out in the countryside with friends on Sundays, find a level patch of ground and us men would spend the afternoon playing Bocci while the ladies played cards and the children had fun in their own way. I still have two sets of Bocci at home - I consider myself to have been a good ‘striker’.
Thank you so much for following my project and for your comments on yesterday's picture.
A great collage, and an interesting explanation, of this came.
I`m not a sport fanatic. My wife is the one that watch them. Foodball, tennis and cycling. So I get inform .
I`m not a sport fanatic. My wife is the one that watch them. Foodball, tennis and cycling. So I get inform .
Great collage on the game of Bocci thanks for the explanations.